The 6 ways to benefit from losing a tender

The 6 ways to benefit from losing a tender

Feb 29, 2016 | Change, Sales

Most of the businesses I work with are medium sized, at best. Most have a significant functional capability that can deliver great value, but they often do not have the ‘grunt’ in other areas to get over the line with large customers.

Many of them are in businesses where competitive tenders are a fact of life, it is a characteristic of many B2B markets, and whilst it is breaking down, the bias towards ‘The big guy’ remains. As they say in corporations,  ‘You do not  get fired for buying from IBM’ which is just a way of expressing the risk aversion of those in many large businesses where making a mistake is career-toxic.

So, why celebrate when you lose?

Here are 6 reasons:

  1. You did well to get on the radar. A key component of B2B marketing is getting on the radar of those in your ideal customers who have some influence, if not always decision making power. Being included in a tender list is evidence that you have succeeded crossing that first hurdle.
  2. Customer intelligence. The information in a tender necessary for tenderers to adequately meet the specifications can tell you a lot about the business. What are its priorities, their capabilities in your areas of competence, their budgeting and  buying rhythm,  and how the buying process works. All great information. It is also extremely useful to assess weather or not they are someone you want to do business with. Selling is a transaction, a 2 way process, as the seller, it is your choice to work with a potential customer or not, so do not be afraid to work only with those who will not only pay you, but value what you bring to the table.
  3. Know the personnel & process. People buy from people, not corporations, the better they know, like and trust you, the greater the chance you have. Getting to know like and trust is a human process, it happens over time, face to face. Preparing and submitting a tender while painful when you lose, is a great way to create other opportunities during the process. Even after you have lost, don’t waste the opportunity to reinforce the relationships that will serve you the next time.
  4. Follow up intelligence. Keeping in touch with a project you have missed out on can tell you a lot about the client, and also a lot about the winning tenderer.  Knowing your competitor better than they know you is always an advantage.
  5. Other opportunities. If the tender you lost was the first tender you did for the customer, you should not be surprised that you lost. Change is hard, and risky, those managing tenders like a simple easy life, so they tend to stay with what they know. However, it is also in their interests to have options, so being around and interested, making yourself an option, might open up  other small opportunities that would just normally get missed. Getting a foot in the door with a small job and doing it really well is the best way I know of to get on the next big tender list.
  6. You get to know where you are not wanted. Sometimes there are opaque barriers to success. Try as you might, make the tenders truly great, and you still do not win, or even get any useful feedback, get the message. Our time combined with our expertise is the most valuable resource we have, don’t waste it where it is not valued, or where there is some invisible barrier to success. Move on.

Remember as well that those awarding tenders are just people, they like to he liked and valued. They like to think that they are awarding business to those who really want it, and are determined to do a great job. So, be persistent and committed, although never ‘needy’, seek to assist them in ways not necessarily associated with a tender, it will help keep you on the radar, and build a relationship.

The 7 most stupid innovation killing behaviors I have seen.

The 7 most stupid innovation killing behaviors I have seen.

Jan 15, 2016 | Change, Innovation

Most of the innovation initiatives I see successfully predict the past, but fail miserably at predicting the future in any way that enables commercial success.

In other words, they just extrapolate what has happened in the expectation that history will repeat itself unchanged.

Sometimes it does, but most often the key lesson from history is that we need to learn from it so we can better anticipate and react the next time, not that the same stuff will happen again.

In 35 years successfully engaged in the processes of innovation as a corporate jockey, and more recently as an adviser and contractor, I have seen and been involved in and directed a significant variety of programs. That experience has offered the opportunity to see some almighty clangers with a few common roots, along with the outstanding successes.

Following are the 7 most common causes of innovation failure I have seen.

 

  1. Structure-less programs. Employees and stakeholders are asked, often directed, to come up growth ideas, it is a part of the strategic plan after all. However, there is no structure to collect, process and collate the fragments, and the sometimes fully formed ideas that emerge. Net result, everyone gets annoyed at the failure of yet another innovation effort that has cost a bomb.
  2. Failure to define the problem. Out of  the box thinking is fine, but out of the postcode is usually useless. True innovation only comes from finding the solution to a problem, in the absence of a problem to be solved, nothing happens.
  3. Not walking the talk. Business leaders often talk about innovation and risk taking, then ensure that anyone who steps out of line gets whacked. Risk-taking must be in the enterprise  DNA, top to bottom.  However, I am a bit sick of all the ‘failureporn’ around, of the ‘fail fast, fail often’ type, which sometimes serves to remove responsibility for failure from the individual, meaning that due diligence, a solid hypothesis, and a problem definition, and After Action Reviews do not get done, leading to a failure to learn. People watch what those in power do, rather than listening to what they say, then follow what they do.
  4. Resource allocation does not happen. Management wants the ‘breakthroughs’, but are unprepared to allocate the resources, This is usually a function of the built in risk profile of the enterprise and its leadership, and is related to the talk and walk above. Resources take time, money, access, (to information, leadership, outside info, etc.) and assistance to be assembled, allocated, deployed, and then have the deployment optimised, before  outcomes arrive.
  5. Silver bullet thinking. If they can just find it, there is a remarkable, easy, hugely profitable solution out there somewhere, will somebody just get off their arse and find it please. Never works in real life, just  the movies.
  6. Excluding ‘trouble-makers’. This is a “biggiee”, the single most common problem I see with most innovation efforts.  Almost no matter how hard most try to gather expertise of various types and from differing domains, experience with innovation initiatives, and well meaning consultants and experts, they fail. Most commonly because unwittingly they gather those like themselves, excluding those that  make them uncomfortable, the ‘crazies’  whose ideas and views are inconsistent with some tacit understanding of what is possible and what is likely. In short, they exclude the mavericks, outspoken, different, and disturbing they may be, essential to a delivering even a modest chance of predicting what is just around the corner, let alone 3-5 years out there.
  7. The government will do it. Government has a role in my view, but in science and basic research, long term investments, not in the commercial development of that research. They are crap at that because there is way too much commercial risk involved, and bureaucracies, particularly public ones, are highly risk averse. It is different to just funding a bunch of smart people to think about what makes the universe tick.

 

Successful innovation is never a ground hog day event. It takes commitment, vision, guts, resources, and it makes you feel uncomfortable and sweaty. It is also the lifeblood of success and commercial sustainability.

When you need a helping hand who has learnt from history, give me a call, but be warned, I am a trouble maker, someone who will question all your sacred cows and sometimes recommend execution.

 

How did I do in 2015?

How did I do in 2015?

Jan 1, 2016 | Change, Marketing, Small business, Strategy

So, it is again New Years Day. January 1, 2016.

Another year gone, but where?

I hope 2015 was a good one for you, and that 2016 is better.

For my part, I will keep on offering up my musings on the challenges facing small businesses in the hope that along the way some of them serve to help some way to make the path easier.

A fundamental part of the way I believe things  should be done is that we learn from our mistakes, so as not to repeat them. To do that we must be able to see the effects of our choices, while understanding the reasons and motivations underlying them at the time, and reflect with clarity and objectivity.

Therefore, it is only fair that my predictions made at this time last year come under scrutiny, before I venture into rubbing my crystal balls for 2016.

Following is my “predictions” post in January 2015, with some commentary added this morning.

You be the judge, score me, comment and point out what I missed, and what I may have called right.

 

Small business is at a crossroads as we move into 2015.

Either they embrace the opportunities and tools presented by the disruption of the “old ways” by digital technology, or they slowly, and in some cases, quickly, become irrelevant, obsolete and broke as customers move elsewhere.

Your choice, as much of the technology can now be relatively  easily outsourced,  and at a very reasonable cost, certainly less than most would expect. The two major challenges in outsourcing, snake oil salesmen and not knowing what you want and need,  are little different to any other category of purchased service.

So, to the trends that will influence your business in 2015 that you need to be at the very least aware of, and in most cases take some sort of pre-emptive action.

      • Marketing technology will continue its rise and rise. The thousands of small marketing technology players who are currently emerging will be forcibly integrated, as the big guys buy “Martec” real estate. Adobe, Microsoft, et al will spend money, and the little guys will be swallowed as the gorillas fill the holes in their offerings, and new segments emerge. At the other end of the scale, there will remain plenty of options for smaller businesses to step into the automated marketing space. The current rash of innovations to make life easier for small businesses   will continue and as those smaller single purpose tools gain traction, and more are launched to fill the niches that exist to service small businesses.

Comment January 2016.  Martec, has become more of a board table topic over the year as investment increases, more options open up, and the “make or break” of marketing has become increasingly recognised.  There has been some takeover and merger activity, and it will only increase in number and scale as the thousands of services merge, Bruce Henderson’s classic  rule of three and Four will continue to apply itself. IBM has also entered the fray launching “Watson”  as an integrated Martec product package.However, despite the inevitable move towards scale,  Martech  will remain a fertile field for innovation as technologists and marketers collaborate on the best ways to identify, engage and lead to a transaction the individual customer.

 

      • Peer to peer marketing  will continue to grow at “Moores law” type rates. Jerry Owyangs honeycombdiagram and data tells it all. Almost any service I can think of has the potential to be disrupted in some way by the peer to peer capabilities being delivered by technology.

Comment January 2016. Absolutely right. In December the NSW government legislated to enable ride sharing services like Uber to compete without legislative interference beyond some basic passenger safety directed rules. This is in despite of the entrenched political position of the Taxi industry and an aggressive campaign including civil actions brought against Uber drivers.  During the latter part of the year, a technically challenged mate of mine spend 3 months in Europe with his wife. Nothing pre-booked, but they easily found accommodation every night using Airbnb and several similar services. When the over 60’s whose device until a few moths ago ‘was just a phone’, is hooked, the hook is set deep and permanent across demographics. Anecdotal but powerful evidence of the penetration of the power of peer to peer markets. 

 

      • Content creation as a process. The next evolution in marketing, the move that I think “content” will start to make from being individual pieces of information produced in an ad hoc manner to being a process that is highly individualised, responsive to the specific context, and informed by the behaviour of the individual recipient scraped from the digital ecosystem. It means that content creation needs to be come an integrated  process, more than a “campaign” . The term “content” will become redundant, it is just “marketing”, focussing on the individual customer.

Comment January 2016. The evolution continues, evidenced by the number of blog posts and templates for “content calendars” that have appeared in the last few months.Over the course of the year I have instituted editorial calendars of one sort or another with several clients, and all are now seeing returns from the efforts that ensure continuation. I am sure I am  not the only consultant from the one man operations as I am to the ‘brand’ consulting services seeing this happening around them, and this trend will certainly (in my mind) continue in 2016

 

      • Marketing will evolve even more strongly as the path to the top corporate job. Functional expertise is becoming less important, what is important is the ability to connect the dots in flattened organisations that work on collaborative projects rather than to a functional tune. This trend is as true for small businesses as it is for major corporations. There will still be challenges as many marketers are really just mothers of clichés, but those relying on the cliché and appearances for credibility are becoming more obvious as the marketing expertise in the boardroom increases, and the availability of analytics quickly uncovers the charlatans. This will make the marketing landscape increasingly competitive on bases other than price.

Comment January 2016 . Anecdotally from what I have seen, this appears to be correct, but I do not have the data to be sure. It certainly makes sense as a way of putting the customer at the ‘pointy end’ of a businesses activities and priorities.As an aside, I have commented repeatedly on the qualities required for success, the primary one these days beyond the necessary functional experience and education being curiosity. Good marketing people are curious, they tend to be less likely than many others to accept the status quo, so make good all round leaders. Pity there are so few good marketing people around, ‘doing marketing’ at university these days is often a choice made in the absence of options. 

 

      • Recognition that marketing is the driving force of any successful enterprise will become accepted, even by the “beanies”. Seth Godin has been banging on for years about the end of the industrial/advertising model, the old school of interruption, but many enterprises have continued to deploy the old model, but  I sense that the time has come.  2015 will be the year that sees marketing finally  takes over.

Comment January 2016. I am still waiting.

 

      • Video will become bigger part of marketing, particularly advantaging the small businesses that have the drive to deploy it and the capability to manage the outsourcing of the bits that they either cannot do, or cannot do economically. The old adage of a picture telling a thousand words is coming to life in twitter streams, instagram shares, and all social media platforms. The video trend will be supported by increasing use of graphics in all forms, but particularly data visualisations as a means to communicate meaning from the mountains of data that we can now generate. The density of data on the web is now such that new ways to cut though, communicate and engage need to be found, and I suspect those will all employ visuals in some form, perhaps interactive?

Comment January 2016. It seems the big marketers poured money into made for the web video over 2015, spending not just on the creative and production, but on the marketing of the material. While video might be a  it of the newest shiny thing, we are visual animals, and there is little doubt the growth will continue.Many of the SME’s I deal with are recognising the opportunities and building their video capabilities either in house or more usually by finding someone outside with the skills, and tit is paying off. 

 

      • Pay to go ad free is a trend that will evolve suddenly, to some degree it is an evolution of subscription marketing. Free to date platforms will charge to be ad free,  whilst new platforms and models such as the Dollar Shave Club will probably evolve.

Comment January 2016. Advertising has been the engine of growth for media companies over 100 years, then came the web, and the indiscriminate bombarding of any mouse click with ads, many of them malicious, so evolved ad blockers. Ironically, looking for data to support this contention, I googled the phrase and up came an article on Forbes magazine, but since I went there last, they have put in a requirement that you disable your  adblocker to get to the article. It may not be with money, but we all recognise the value of an email address these days. Rest my case.

 

      • The death of mass and the power of triibes will become more evident. The “cat pictures ” nature of  content of social media platforms will reduce as marketers discover smart ways to package and deliver messages that resonate and motivate action. The agility of digitally capable small businesses will open up opportunities for them their bigger rivals will not see, or not be compatible with their existing business models.

Comment January 2016. There still seems to me as much if not more of the cat photo rubbish floating around, but mixed in is the increasingly targeted messages that resonate with customers and consumers in some pretty obscure niches. A small client of mine was persuaded to really “niche-down’ in 2015, and reaped significant benefits as a result. Niche marketing will continue to grow.

 

      • Local,  provenance, and  “real”. Marketing is about stories, so here is a trend made for  marketers, and you do not have too be a multinational, just have a good story, rooted in truth and humanity. ‘Hyper-local” will become a significant force. Marketing aimed at small geographies, such as is possible by estate agents, and “local” produce, such as the increasing success of “Hawkesbury Harvest” in Sydney, and the “Sydney Harvest” value chain initiative.

Comment January 2016. Little doubt this trend is alive and well. Following on from the examples from last year, the local farmers markets around Sydney have continued to grow both in number and visitors, and you cannot move at Flemington on a Friday or Saturday for the retail produce sales. The major retailers have both introduced programs that deliver produce to their shelves that just a year ago would have been scrapped because it failed the visual test. Now however, following the success of the “ugli fruit”  campaign in the US being ugly is a marketing benefit. (perhaps there is hope for me yet)

 

      • Paid social media will evolve more quickly than any of us anticipate, or would be forecast by a simple extrapolation. Twitter will go paid, travelling the route Facebook took to commercialize their vast reach. Some will hate it as it filters their feeds, others  will welcome the reduction of the stream coming at them from which they try and drink. Anyway, twitter et al will set out to make money by capitalising on their reach.

Comment January 2016. This had better remain a forecast as I have seen no evidence that it has evolved much from a year ago beyond the continuing  squeeze being exerted on organic reach by Facebook and others. Twitter remains an uncurated torrent of posts, where use of the management tools is in the hands of the user.

 

      • Social will grab more of the market  in 2015 than it has had, even though the growth has been huge over the last few years. Small businesses will either embrace social and content marketing, in which case their agility and flexibility will put them in a competitively strong position, or if they fail to do so, they will fall further behind, and become casualties.

Comment January 2016. Again, plenty of anecdotal evidence, but little objective evidence I have seen, although plenty of the sort published by those with an interest in the success of social media trumpeting their own success.

 

      • The customer should always be the focal point of any organisation, but often they fail to get a mention. It is becoming more important than ever that you have a “360 degree” view of your customers, as the rapid evolution of social media and data generation and mining is enabling an ever more detailed understanding of the behaviour drivers of consumers. The density of highly targeted marketing, both organic and paid is increasing almost exponentially, so if you do not have this 360 degree view, your marketing will miss the mark.

Comment 2016. Wise thoughts from a year ago,  but hardly original. There would not be a management book anywhere that did not somewhere suggest that customers are what keep you in business, not the beauty of your product, and not  the efficiency of your processes, but the value you deliver.

 

      • Treat with caution all the predictions you read, keep an absolutely open mind, as the only thing we know for sure about them is that they will be wrong, as with this ripper from Bloomberg who predicted the failure of the iphone. However, as with statistical models, quoting George E.P. Box who said “Essentially, all models are wrong, it is just that some are useful” perhaps some of the predictions you find around this time of the year will be useful, by adding perspective and an alternative view to your deliberations for 2015.

Comment  January 2016  Still good advice.

As a final thought, if you think your kid may be good at marketing, be sure they learn maths and statistics. “Maths & Stats”  will increasingly be the basis of marketing, and the source of highly paid jobs and service business start-ups.

Have a great 2015.

Comment January 2016. I still think this is a great idea.

 

 

things I learnt, and relearnt, about marketing in 2015

things I learnt, and relearnt, about marketing in 2015

Dec 22, 2015 | Branding, Change, Customers, Management, Marketing

The year has been a blur, they go faster as I get older, something I find disturbing. Rushing headlong towards the daisy bed seems illogical when there is so much left to do.

I will be 64 in a few weeks, must be a song there somewhere, but it seems that the older I get, the more I learn.

How does that work?

Perhaps that  is because I have a wide and deep foundation built up over all those years that offers many places to tuck some added knowledge in, and the connections to other parts of the foundation are that more visible.

Anyway, here are the headline  things that struck me during the year.

All that is old is new again.

The king of Mad Men, David Ogilvy said it best, something like 50 years ago.  “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.”  Never before has this been so relevant, as we drown in a sea of mediocre so called ‘content”. What is an old fashioned ad if it is not content? What is an informative film made to show users how to build something, or adjust the points on my old Dodge, if not content. Just because the rules of engagement have changed, i.e., those on the other end of a communication can now tell us if it sucks, either by writing to us, responding on a site that scored whatever it s we flog, or ignoring it. The challenge remains the same. Find your market and build an emotional connection with them.

Scale is not everything.

In the pre internet days, a young academic named Michael Porter wrote the definitive book on competition. One of his 5 forces was all about scale. If you had it, you carried the hammer others could only aspire to, volume sales, negotiating power in your supply chains, power to advertise and promote, it was a huge barrier to either scale or hide behind.

No longer.

The net has destroyed much of the competitive power of scale. One of the greatest wielders of power I see every day are the two FMCG retail gorillas in Australia, who between them hold 75% of FMCG (CPG to my US friends) market share. Yesterday I went into woollies to buy the Xmas ham. My job for  years. In about 30 linear feet of chiller shelf, with many SKU’s of ham on the bone, not one was a proprietary brand. Every single SKU was Woolworths in some guise or another. Clearly buying scale at work for woollies, but I walked out hamless, and went to a small supplier who has a retail outlet about 15 k from my home and bought a ham there. Good price, good service, and probably a better ham because the margins had not been screwed to the bone by Woolies exercising their power of scale. (poor pun, sorry)

The tool relies on the tradesman.

There are so many tools around, to do just about everything, but by themselves they do nothing. All still require a skilled person to get the most out of them.

I have laid many bricks in the course of renovating two old houses, paid my way through Uni all those years ago on building sites, so I know how to do it, but look in my backyard, and you can tell the brinks I have laid, and those laid by a tradesman. If you want something done properly, only do it yourself it is what you do, not what some webinar on YouTube tells you can do.

Do not be seduced by the newest shiny thing.

Simplicity is really hard.

‘The ultimate sophistication is simplicity’.

Steve jobs said those words, and others before and after have said similar things that have been proven time and time again over the years. In todays world it holds more true than ever when it is operationally now so easy to add features few want, sacrificing simplicity and elegance in the process.

We tend to fall in love with our products, forgetting people do not care about them, only what they will do for them, what problems they solve, what value they deliver.

Dunbar’s number still rules.

We might have hundreds, even thousands of “friends” and connections, but we can only manage a limited number. We have been again seduced to believe that there is value in the breadth of many  connections, sacrificing the depth with a lesser number. I would rather have a list of 100 people who knew me well, would take a phone call from me, recognise the value I can bring to them, and are prepared to recommend me to others  based on that value, than a million friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other of the other houses of digital one night stands.

Customers are people.

Customers and potential customers are not “targets” or ‘target audiences’, or ‘potentials’ or ‘rusted-on’ or any of the other expressions I hear regularly. They are people , they control their pockets in ways unimaginable just a few short years ago. Treating them with distain, or even a hint of condescension, tan they are able and willing to pack up and go elsewhere.  The power is very much in their hands  now, not those of the marketer, so make your communication as personal and specific as you can. I get lots of emails with the salutation “Dear Friend”. If I was so effing dear, why not use mu name. They never get opened, and a rule gets put in my email package to dump them into the Spam file never to be seen again. Dear friend indeed, give me a break!

Trust is the make or break metric.

Trust is a word that gets bandied around like a novelty game at  the Easter show. Everyone agrees that trust is a key, but so few recognise that Trust comes from consistent, transparent and generous behaviour, it is hard earned and easily lost, and never given without deep consideration. Don’t let this important word pass your lips unless you really mean it, and back it up with behaviour over a long period.

The nature of assets.

Almost forever, corporate assets in enterprises of any size from micro of MNC have been one of three in some sort of ratio: people, technology, and capital.

Now there is a fourth.

Data.

The integration of data cross functionally, through the value chain, and increasingly with outside “big data” is becoming rapidly more important than the traditional three as the world digitises and competition is increasingly dependent on the availability and accuracy of data from a range of sources.

One of my mates runs a small freight business. He recently added GPS, and a simple program to route his small fleet in real time, that integrates with public traffic info. Now he is wondering if he can  do with less trucks, and maybe make a bit of a return on his investment for a change.

Recall the furore when the email addresses of Ashley Madison subscribers  were hacked and made available for download. The asset value of data has rarely been more publicly demonstrated.

Beware the seductive hiss.

Snake oil salesman have found a new well of clichés and poisonous  bullshit to throw at you.

Beware.

Next time you hear the word ‘awesome’ (my current greatest hate cliché)  run like hell, and save yourself the time and potentially money these sophisticated purveyors of snake oil will try and winkle out of you.

Why do 9/10 new FMCG products fail?

Jun 15, 2015 | Change, Innovation, Small business

innovation failure

Wheels still on?

There are lots of reasons, I have heard them all, and even used a couple myself, but blaming the retailers, engineers, competitors, lack of advertising, or the weather misses the essential truth.

The process is flawed.

We know the constraints of the retailers, they set the rules and suppliers have to live with them. We cannot control the competition, although mostly they are pretty predictable, and resources for advertising are never enough. Our engineers and designers are ours, so we can get the best out of them, if we are good enough, and we cannot predict the weather, let along control it.

The thing we do control, but rarely leverage well is the innovation management processes most of us use.

If  9/10 products fail, surely there must be something wrong with the logic and processes that allowed them to progress through the system to launch, consuming precious resources as they go.

They get spat out, launched, fail, and we blame everything but the stray dog around the corner, and our NPD&C process.

Silly really.

Why are the processes flawed?

There are standard operating procedures taught with minor variations almost everywhere, they are logical, sequential, and like economics assume knowledge and insight. Nothing like the real world really.

Following is a list of the failure-drivers I have seen over the years.

The ideas are narrow. Ask yourself where most ideas that get into the system come from.

  • Customers. In many industries, solving a customer problem is a great source of ideas, but in FMCG, customers or as we should call them, buyers, have little idea beyond ways to save a few bob, or copy something else that is doing OK, but they have the shelf space to rent, so we bend over.
  • Consumers. We spend millions asking consumers what they want, then trying to interpret the answers in some coherent way, when the truth is as it always was, consumers do not know what they do not know. Henry Fords quip that had he asked his customers what  they wanted, they would have answered a faster horse, still holds.
  • The bosses wife. Always a good source of ideas, mostly crap, but carrying considerable weight in the system.
  • Your sales force. There can be the gem hidden amongst the dross, but usually they are responding to what their customers  (read buyers) tell them, what the opposition has done to pinch a shelf facing, or just looking for reasons they are behind budget. Good sales people are usually pretty focussed on the things that make a difference now, not next year or next decade, so at best they may come up with a useful range extension.

The business case. I am in favor of rigorous planning and being held accountable for results, but when you think about it, our ability to tell the future is pretty limited to non-existent, but we persist with executing on a business plan because it is, well, the plan. Every business case I have ever seen has two common features:

  • A positive forecast of outcomes. Profits, market share, volumes, whatever it is, the forecast is for great things.
  • Detailed cost analysis. This includes the costs to manufacture, buy shelf space, promotional programs, advertising, research, and all the rest. Again, all if we are honest with ourselves, factors we can only really take a best guess at. The only thing we know for sure is that the forecasts will be wrong.

We believe our own bullshit. Because we have spent all that time, effort, and money creating a business case, we then use them to prioritise the options on the basis of the best returns.

We fail at articulating the product. Every successful product I have seen has some essential component that both makes it different to anything else around, and in the process adds value to sufficient lives for there to be an incremental source of new demand. If all we do is cut the existing cake differently, the only winner is the retailer. Somehow we need to make the cake bigger, find that new and elusive consumer demand.

We fail to brief designers. This follows the previous failure, we stumble at articulating the product specs against which the technologists, engineers and creatives have to execute. If we do not know, how can they? Besides, they are usually brought in too late in the design process, they respond to the performance specs marketing tells them the market wants, instead of being a proactive part of designing the specs. This usually ensures that few operational or technology innovations get a guernsey.

Momentum. Once a project starts to move along, it builds momentum, garners support in all sorts of places, and becomes a “project” to be completed, rather than an expression of new consumer demand.

The net result of all the above is that the biggest risk is at the end, when the sunk cost in resources and ego play against anything other than a gung ho launch.

So what is the solution to all this waste, apart from just getting better at fortune telling?

Take some lessons for  the “lean” movement, the operational implementation of the scientific method.

Iterate in small steps, get a few consumers involved early in a hands on way to see of if your value proposition is sound, do a series of small experiments testing hypotheses, and be prepared to be wrong, and alter the approach. Deploy genuine cross functional teams from both inside and outside the organisation, engage in constructive “devils advocate” thinking, and most important of all, have a strategy for the business that drives the new product development process to contribute to the  strategic outcomes, not just the forecast sales and financial ones.

None of this is easy, but that is why there is so much upside, the corporate clones cannot see the opportunities. It is also why increasingly, small and medium business has an advantage over the corporate behemoths that dominate the landscape. They are able to take quick decisions based in instinct, experience, discontinuities that emerge, and an intimacy with customers large businesses can only dream about.

Call me when I can help.

Marketing’s great dilemma: Too much choice.

Jun 12, 2015 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

apologies to Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com

apologies to Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com

Faced with so much choice of technology and platform options to reach and engage consumers, many marketers are paralysed. On the other hand, many are tempted to be all things to all people, simply because the tools are there to reach them, and they hope that they strike a hot prospect somewhere.

“It’s a numbers game” dominates many conversations, and it seems limiting your options  is silly.

However, the customer has extraordinarily well developed bullshit meters to filter out the digital noise, so unless you are very specific with the offer, it will not pass the filter, it will not be seen.

It seems to me there is way too little being done to consider the people we are trying to reach. It is ironic that the tools have given us access to their lives,  but often we choose to ignore the individual and chase the usually poorly defined “triibe”. A great description coined by Seth Godin, now misused by many.

We need to stop obsessing about the tools and ask ourselves three basic questions:

What is it we are trying to do?,

Why should anyone care?

How do we use these tools now available to make a difference?.

It seems to me there are four strategies

  1. Establish your “Why“. Simon Sinek in his seminal TED talk compellingly makes the argument that this is the core of marketing, to quote, “people do not get what you do, they get why you do it”.
  2. Build relationships. This sounds a bit yukkie, but when done with a genuine desire  to help, and add value to others, it delivers to both parties. The twin brothers of C21 marketing, “Social media marketing” and “content marketing”  have between them led us astray. Everyone is working feverishly at the tools trying to be different, the face in the crowd that stands out, but mostly failing, there are just too many faces, and too few asking the follow up question of “what am I going to do with them when I have their attention”. For the faces, they are attracted from time to time and let down somehow, and have become even more reluctant to give anything easily.
  3. Bridge the gap between what you say, and the customer experience. Too many marketers are there for the money, not for  the joy of delivering on the “why”, and do not really care about the challenge of getting their customers to say “that was amazing?” Marketing is emerging as the difference between success and failure in this commoditised and transparent world, so you better get some of the rare good stuff.
  4. Choose your tools based on the behavior of the individual consumer. There are so many tools, and combinations of tools available, that making the choices becomes a task of considerable proportion. Choosing the right combination can be the difference, so make sure you choose on the basis of the best way to match your messages to the behavior of  the consumer, not by what is available. No good having a hammer when you need a screwdriver. When you are building a deck at the back of  the house, the choice is obvious, but when building a bridge to the consumer, the discriminating factor is their behavior in any given set of circumstances, and this is really hard to predict, you really need to understand them in great detail. There is too much technology, it has become the end, rather than the means.

When you are stuck, give me a call.